Updates from March
Sign subscribers up to your other newsletters with automations
Buttondown’s Automations builder now includes an “Add to [newsletters you manage]” action. It works with every trigger sans “When an email is sent” and those involving Stripe.
Go to the Automations view in your Buttondown dashboard, click the New button in the upper right corner, and select the new option from the Action dropdown menu to start building.
You might, for example, add someone to your secondary (tertiary, even!) newsletter after they respond to a survey in your primary newsletter. Or after they reply to an email from your popup newsletter. Or whatever else you dream up. Automations exist to let you build for your own use cases, after all.
Read the changelog article for helpful context on why this is often a better approach than segmenting audiences with tags, or for details on how to set up the “Add to…” trigger via the Buttondown API.
Individual subscriber analytics in the Subscribers view
Your average open and click rates are improving but not as fast as you’d like. Who’s bringing it down? Now you can find out in the Subscribers view! (It’s Rick, by the way)
Open the view from your Buttondown dashboard, click the Customize dropdown, and add the Open rate (%) and/or Click rate (%) columns. This will show you which subscribers are the most active and which Ricks need some personal outreach from you. Learn more about it from this month’s announcement.
From the blog
One of our favorite user cohorts of newsletter creators is authors and journalists. And one of their favorite non-newsletter tools is StoryOrigin, a sort of all-in-one marketing platform for growing an audience and selling books. Evan Gow, StoryOrigin’s founder, sat down with us and shared some fantastic self-promotion advice for professional writers.
Whether you’re a self-published author or a musician or some other one-person-operation, one of the best things you can do is learn how to build processes for your specific needs. APIs, (application programming interfaces for those of us who don’t live and breath code every day), are an excellent way to create custom workflows! While many APIs feel intimidating, non-technical folks should have no trouble working with Buttondown’s API.
If you can parse a few lines of Javascript or Ruby, you can definitely get a handle on the etymology of the internet’s longest-running slang and patois. It’s maybe half as usual as learning and API but twice as heartwarming!
Other stuff
The Venn diagram of people who love both RSS and metadata is pretty much (all?) overlap, and we’ve covered its entirety with our latest RSS settings update!
Our team also made it easier to understand and troubleshoot when Buttondown can’t deliver your newsletter to specific subscribers.
Set up your newsletter so that every draft is automatically shared to Tumblr, the soon-to-be newest platform to incorporate ActivityPub!